As a note he says this will be the "new mainstay of the air force" however we still have the F-22 as our air superiority fighter which is still believed to be better then anything out there, and indeed in their simulation the only limitation to the F-22 was there were too few of them. So this isn't really about America losing air superiority its about a few analysts not taking into account the entire mission of the three branches of the military. Maybe this plane doesn't stack up well against the F-16 or F-22, but It sure beats the Harrier and the F-18.

Because the JSF is a shitty bomb truck too. It doesn't have the range, capacity or loiter time of nearly any other option. And for CAS vs bomb hauling, the JSF simply doesn't have the gun (and again, lacks the loiter time).

"As a note he says this will be the 'new mainstay of the air force' however we still have the F-22 as our air superiority fighter which is still believed to be better then anything out there, and indeed in their simulation the only limitation to the F-22 was there were too few of them."

We aren't dealing in hypotheticals where we can have any number of planes we want. That's the basic lesson of the RAND study: dollar for dollar you can have so many more SU-3 7 derivatives that even if the F-22's have a perfect kill probability, they quickly exhaust their magazines and have nothing else to do. And that's the outcome of the simulation: the F-22's live, most of the rest of the blue force dies, and red gains air superiority over the straight of Taiwan via the remaining flankers.

"It sure beats the Harrier and the F-18."

The FA-18 is more capable than the F-35 in both the A2A and A2G missions as a result of its superior capacity, range, and time on station. Comparing the FA-18 to the F-22 is more muddled, and IMHO comes down to an assesment of the relative performance of stealth vs EW. The prevailing attitude among the Russian military designers is that stealth is mitigated by state of the art communicating radars and passive emission detection (they claim detection of the F-22 at 50km on passive IR alone). And of course, as soon as the F-22 takes a shot stealth is no longer a consideration. Thankfully the F-22 is fast enough that it can turn and run. The F-35 can't, which is why they were decimated in the sim.

Also, a Su-35 Flanker cant fire a missile at 50km without radar lock, which would be difficult against a F-35. Even if they did fire a future Long-Range IR missile, the F-35 would detect and release flares to avoid the missile. Also, the kinetics of the missile would make it hard to track a F-35 during terminal phase.

A F/A-18 has significant less range and time on station than F-35, with both internally fueled. The F/A-18 carries all weapons externally.

As for your comment about stealth when the F-22 fires a missile, that assumes the F-22 doesn't change course after firing said missile. The F-22 would most likely turn away from the target, so they are not staying behind the missile relative to the target.

Pretty much everything you said in this entire thread is wrong or at least misguided.

"As for your comment about stealth when the F-22 fires a missile, that assumes the F-22 doesn't change course after firing said missile."

Doesn't matter. Once you've got a launch flare that gives you a position fix to hand to the radar to do localized searching, dramatically weakening the likelihood of avoiding continued spotting.

F-22: 0.0005 m2

F-35: 0.0015 m2

F-16C: 1.0m2

Su-27/Su-30 Flanker: 10.0m2 (China has this series and J-11 "Flankers" built domestically)

Su-35 (Advanced) Flanker: 1.0m2 (Russia only)

From the front a stealthy F-35 is basically noise against the background using X-Band radar. The latest L-Band radar on a Su-30MKI (Bars N011M) or Su-35 AESA couldn't actually track a stealth target but might get a faint return.

My comment about the missile is that most missiles don't maintain full thrust the entire flight over 30NM - they have an initial boost to Mach 2.5+, then they coast at lower thrust until reaching the target. Newer missiles might have terminal boost but this would likely not be enough to hit an F-35 that sees the missile on EODAS. Very few Russian (or US made) missiles can shoot down a jet fighter at 20NM+ when that fighter detects the missile.

I'm familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of the Su-27 and Su-30. The Su-27 OLS is the best feature against a stealth adversary but its nowhere near as good as the F-35 EODAS.

A F-35 would be almost impossible to track at 30NM using AESA radar much less a F-22. An F-15C with the latest APG-82 AESA can't track a F-22 for radar lock at 1000 ft range so what chance would a Su-30 have at 30NM. The SU-30 pilot would have to manually cue the OLS without radar. Auto-cueing a heat source would lock onto the flares.

In around 60-90 seconds into the merge an F-35 would be within range for an AIM-9 Sidewinder missile shot while the Su-30 pilot is trying to cue the OLS manually. Most recent dogfights are over in under 2 minutes.

Take a look at this documentary on the F-22 program. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-Sh1SAaJz0

And here is the RAND press release about the previous report you referenced. http://www.rand.org/news/press/2008/09/25.html "Those reports are not accurate."

Any argument like this in favor of the F35 is very dubious. You're talking about the F35 allegedly defeating older technology with radar, stealth, and missiles. Yow know what will win using radar, stealth, and missiles? Drones. Who might suddenly show up to a battlefield with a lot of drones?

If you know how much heat is coming out, then you know roughly what thrust should be being produced. Couple that with known performance characteristics of the aircraft - i.e. aircraft don't just go from manoeuvring in one way to manoeuvring in another - and I would imagine you can tell the two apart fairly easily.

After all, fighter jets don't, at least in the course of normal operation, just change their emission profile and fall out of the sky.

There have been cases of MiG-21s and Mirage F1s releasing flares and successfully avoiding an AIM-9 missile fired at them from less than 10NM. The engaging fighter usually speeds towards the target and fires a second missile at closer range and shoots it down.

...

>the F-22's live,

F-22 is cheaper than F-35 (and btw looks better - weapons look is important for projecting power - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtahqXjFcxU :), yet F-22 program was closed because of cost while F-35 continues (and still seems to be in R&D stage, though the late stage of R&D). Something bad about F-22 vs. that being good in F-35? Or just government spending logic?

Interesting also that there is a ban on export of F-22 (even to good friends like UK/etc) while F-35 is supposed to be available for export.

I believe it's just this. Too much of our military's decision making is influenced by the contractors that build the weapons. The F-35 is the largest single military purchase we've ever done. Too many people would lose too much if the program was abandoned, so the politicians involved cannibalized budgets from things that could be a competitor.

"Interesting also that there is a ban on export of F-22 (even to good friends like UK/etc) while F-35 is supposed to be available for export."

It is. I think that may be partly to do with materials used on the F-22, particularly the coatings. It has to be 'repainted' every so often in a very precise way, so to sell them to allies we'd also have to transfer knowledge of the materials and process.

It's worth noting that many of the customers that were in line to buy the F-35 have pulled out or are at least voicing concerns in their media.

I still think manned combat aircraft are probably on the way out, and absent a current threat, we should be life-extending our existing aircraft, spending 10% of F-35/F-22/etc. on combat UAVs, and end up with ultimately better capability (like, 100x more UAVs than manned aircraft, the ability to go on one-way missions, etc.) Kills the aviator officer career path, though.

We've virtually abandoned A and B line planes because the testosterone blinded fighter mafia in the airforce would rather have fun toys than useful equipment, and the navy is right there with them because heavy planes can't take off from aircraft carriers. It doesn't help that the one bomber the air force begrudgingly agreed to acquire is an obscenely expensive hanger queen, designed for nuclear bombing runs deep into the Soviet Union.

If the army wasn't barred from operating fixed wing aircraft by the pernicious Key West agreement, maybe they would operate as a voice of reason.

We should be working on a replacement for the AC-130 (1968), the A-10 (1977), and B-52 (1955!). To the extent we actually need more air superiority fighters they can bring back the F-22 line.

Two observations along these lines, however:

* The B-52 originally was the US Air Force's all-purpose bomber when it rolled out in the 50s. It was a conventional heavy bomber, a strategic nuclear bomber, and a cruise missile platform all in one. Over time, however, the USAF's bombing roles have become split; the B-1 now takes on the role of a conventional bomber, while the B-2 is used for deep-penetration strikes and standoffs.

* One big hurdle in the development of a B-52 replacement is the limitations on the number of strategic bombers allowed under the New Start treaty. The US cannot easily develop new nuclear-capable bombers under this treaty, and thus must keep a chunk of the B-52 fleet around to maintain the nuclear capability.

Conceptually it fills the role of a very large drone.

What's really needed from a modern bomber is a high munition capacity, a large combat radius, and long loiter times. Cheap to build and operate would be great too. Super stealth as well as high speeds and maneuverability are simply expensive distractions.

For the rare situation where we need to deliver something like a conventional bunker buster deep inside of territory that we don't wish to first completely destroy the AA cababilities of first -- i.e. an Osirak type mission -- we still have 20 of those $2 billion B-2s.

The requirements of "high munition capacity, a large combat radius, and long loiter times" closely fit the description of a close air support role, which has been the primary role for bombers and strike aircraft in recent years (Iraq and Afghanistan).

With that said, there are certainly other roles for bombers; missions where strategic facilities, supply lines, and bases/defenses must be destroyed. These are rooted in more conventional warfare than we've seen recently, but I'm less than convinced that they would be rare in a major conflict.

These conventional missions demand speed and stealth not only to penetrate evade enemy air defenses, but also to keep up with intelligence on mobile/time-sensitive targets. This timely delivery problem is hard to accomplish with small numbers of loitering aircraft or where the target has advance warning.

Also, given the proliferation of advanced mobile SAM and radar systems, I'm unsure of the assumption that US aircraft will have clear skies in a future conflict. Certainly in the early days of any conflict this will be untrue, and those are the days where strategic bombing will be most valuable; disrupted enemy infrastructure allow ground forces to move without resistance.

Thus, I think there's a need for both roles--CAS and penetrating bomber--and it seems to me that the USAF is actually tackling these separately, efficiently. While the Reaper lacks a large payload, it seems that the large numbers providing spatial coverage will have sufficient munitions in aggregate. The B-2 was designed to be the penetrator.

Two legs is obviously less secure than three, and we don't have a fourth because we haven't developed a fourth technology for delivering nuclear weapons.

Those requirements make me thing of schemes where cruise missiles are dumped out the back of a C-130J Super Hercules for air-launch.

This seems an inadequate and/or overly-simplified explanation. The F-14 was a beast, far heavier than the F-35 or, for that matter, the A-6. And that was 1960s technology. Surely now we could build a capable, carrier-launched ground-attack craft with weight comparable to an F-14?

[1] Stevenson, James P. The $5 Billion Misunderstanding. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2001. ISBN 1-55750-777-5.

(For that matter, there were the C-130 tests on a carrier, which was probably pushing the bounds of good sense, but it did work.)

I think you may have missed the B-1 and the enormous focus on UAVs by all of the branches.

I am optimistic about UAVs as a relatively inexpensive replacement for a lot of aircraft, but I fear that once their successes start to endanger the justifications for testosterone toys, internal factions within the military as well as politicians in the pockets of defense contractors will hit back hard.

trying to argue that we need the F-35 or that it will provide any kind of strategic military value is absurd.

To a certain extent, this has been true for more than two decades. I used to work as a radar engineer for the RAAF, and every time we went on exercises against US forces (both teams flying F 18s, but with different missile payloads, we had AIM9s, the Americans had AMRAAM), we would see our aircraft swatted from the sky before we could even get the bogeys on weapons-system radar. Talk about dog-fighting maneuverability and visibility is just ridiculous - if you're using those characteristics, you've already lost the battle. In the control room we used to joke that the USN could have sent P51s equipped with AMRAAMs and AWACS support and they would still win.

Modern fighter aircraft need to:

a) not be seen b) be fast (time to target is still important!) c) carry a decent payload of weapons.

Ideally target selection should be provided by AWACS, and missile-sensors provide the final kill guidance, allowing the fighter (AKA missile-launch platform) to remain stealthy. In the absence of AWACS, the fighter will need to carry it's own sensor suite.

Modern air warfare is all about sensors, ECM and stealth. The airframe is almost inconsequential.

>Modern fighter aircraft need to: a) not be seen b) be fast (time to target is still important!) c) carry a decent payload of weapons. Ideally target selection should be provided by AWACS, and missile-sensors provide the final kill guidance, allowing the fighter (AKA missile-launch platform) to remain stealthy. In the absence of AWACS, the fighter will need to carry it's own sensor suite. Modern air warfare is all about sensors, ECM and stealth. The airframe is almost inconsequential.

Why even bother putting a pilot into a steel tube with wings so it can fly some distance ahead, launch another faster steel tube with fins, then turn back.

The only reason to even have a person in there is for dog-fighting for what I see. Otherwise with specs you described, it is just a pointless waste of money.

Drones seem sexy and safe, but I'd be very surprised if we didn't keep pilots in the plane for a long time.

Now if you did get close to one, considering that the popular ones are visibly repurposed airliners they would probably go down pretty easy. But that's a little like saying "I can sink your aircraft carrier with my 16" gun" without the proviso that "... as long as you let me get way too close first".

So when you see hostile planes driving towards you, you send some fighters to go and shoot them down.

Meanwhile the AWACS can be supporting air, sea and ground battles happening for hundreds of kilometres in every direction. They really are powerful tools.

The point is to deal with what exists currently and what is likely to exist in the service life of a military system.

You're right though. Space will eventually and inevitably be much more militarised.

But at the price of $1T they better be thinking of the future and think about opponents who are also willing to spend around that order of magnitude on defense.

Sure the space-borne laser or railgun is fun, but it's probably not the first thing that the Taliban or their equivalent will attempt. Unless they can find a way to hijack one that we've conveniently installed for them.

Yeah it seems big defense is building for two opponents. Strategic opponents -- basically anyone who has nukes and is not an friend.

Then there is a need to build for guerrilla warfare, roadside bombs, urban combat, target assassinations.

Recently the later seem to matter more. But big and high tech projects will get funding and will do so. Now the system is broken and often the only reason these projects get funded is because there is some defense contractor extending its hand waiting for the next $200M to keep profits up and people employed.

Now it would be interesting to research how to combat or counteract drones? What can someone in a poor country oppressed by a more powerful enemy with drones do to defend against them. Can they be detected easily?

Small teams with tight deadlines can do wonders. This is why Skunkworks stuck. But it's important to note that Kelly Johnson was behind a lot of the big successes there and he was an amazing man. Absent organizational genius, you can run into trouble. The JSF is pretty much the antithesis of "small teams with tight deadlines".

The federal government does not analyze spending the same way we do because __spending benefits the economy__, which is part of the government's responsibility. They intentionally spend money to stimulate the economy.

So when the military spends $1 trillion on planes, they are really trading $1 trillion for planes plus economic stimulus.

In other words, the planes don't literally cost $1 trillion. Rather the cost of the planes = $1 trillion minus the economic benefit of spending.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Keynesianism

Hayek originally debunked this line of thinking in the Parable of the Broken Window: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

I agree that Military Keynesianism is not the best way for the government to stimulate the economy. That does not change the fact that it is the de facto economic policy of the United States.

Here are some relevant analyses from inside and outside the Pentagon.

- Spinney's "Defense Power Games" http://www.dnipogo.org/fcs/def_power_games_98.htm * Chomsky's -

- "The Pentagon System" http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/PentagonSystem_Cho....

/libertarian

1. If you don't believe in globalization, you can legitimately lock out foreign competition and insist on an all-American supply chain, keeping jobs and money in the US.

2. It allows you to bring home the pork. Military contractors have a proven willingness to situate assembly plants to deliver jobs in politically convenient locations.

3. It's compatible with Libertarian/Tea Party beliefs, as military spending tends to get a free pass from the balanced budget brigade.

4. People will call you "a hawk" and "strong on defense" and "supporting our troops". Or at least they won't call you the opposite of those things.

5. Spending on things like DARPA funds cool things like the internet and the DARPA Grand Challenge and robots and things. Pretty sciencey and cool.

6. $60 million in lobbying in 2012 https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=D01&yea... with Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin all in the top 20 individual donors https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=s&showYe...

Compare that to funding boring old schools and bridges and things which have none of these benefits.

Tea Party, maybe, but not libertarian. Reason, Cato, and the like are highly critical of military spending and very frequently chastise mainstream Republicans for focussing on discretionary and entitlement spending while ignoring the military spending.

I have seen lots of articles that discuss wasteful DoD spending. But I see very few that discuss __why__ the DoD spends money this way. And why it continues. This type of spending is not a new phenomenon.

To me these "why" questions are the most important and intellectually interesting aspects of these issues. But they are often ignored.

...or, maybe, education?

The $3k cost per person of a $1T plane makes me feel inclined to think about what else could be done with that kind of money.

So, while drones might be a "better" way for the military to spend $1T, I think it's worth entertaining the idea that there might be a better way for a nation to spend that money. Like, say, on education.

Education is good for figuring out how to acheive your goals, including if those goals are "killing your enemy".

> Why would that be the purview of the military?

Because its a substantial force multiplier.

And a insurgency with smart engineers and chemists will be one hell to contain.

The increased performance of unmanned vehicles, as well as the cost savings of the whole life-support system (and perhaps, reduced pilot risk = lower training/HR embodied costs as well) seem like they might make such a system practical.

[1] Taking it a step further, you have a central control platform surrounded by defensive drone cloud responsible for point defence, active sensors (which you don't want to do personally since it tells enemies exactly where you are), and mesh/onion routed control links to your offensive drone swarm (so enemies can't infer the controller location from lines of sight intersections to the stuff they can see).

Even even further down the line, distribute the human controllers into the defensive swarm, so they're hard/impossible to distinguish from the "dumb" drones, and less of a Single Big Target worth hitting.

You'd look for the larger drones that never pull turns over 8.5g.

AFAIK it works by lowering the signal/noise ratio to the point the channel is useless for it's intended purpose.

Something with extremely tight focus via aimable directional antenna or phased array, along with spread spectrum hopping would be extremely hard to jam, because you need to get enough energy into the channel to mess with it.

GPS jamming can be countered by a better inertial nav system, and even the tightbeam comms themselves can be used to locate approx positions with enough links.

Regarding combat capabilities, is there any fundamental reason for their relative lack of performance beyond it being unnecessary/risky with high-latency comms? From a quick scan of current costs, you could get >10 Avenger/Predator C drones (~15M ea) for a single F-35 (~200M) or F-22 (~150M).

I suspect (but am utterly unqualified to say) that such an encounter would go badly for the (human) fighter, especially if everyone has modern AMRAAM or similar BVR weapons ("... we only need to be lucky once").

In fact that's one of the big reasons the U.S. requires their pilots to be commissioned officers, is because they have to be cognizant of the laws of war, current Rules of Engagement that are in force, the effect of a given attack on the geopolitical framework, etc. and this has to happen in an environment where they are the only ones with an accurate (or semi-accurate) understanding of the actual picture on-the-ground.

But what happens to your bombers when you don't have air superiority?

What would China's economy look like after they decided to launch an invasion of Taiwan?

SEAD, CAS, precision bombing, cargo and personnel transport -- these are missions that our military will actually be called on to perform, not the dogfighting the fighter pilot mafia wishes was needed.

funny how the planes here, like on youtube, are rated by reputation, and not by knowledge, experience, or dare i say, facts.

So economically its far cheaper to not build one F-35 while buying 100 Tomahawks, then cruise missile every airfield, than to lose your entire stock of F-35 on one sortie.

Another way to phrase it, is every sortie you can either lose all your F-35, or "lose" one by not buying it and carpet bomb every single enemy .mil airfield minutes before the F-35 sortie. It seems pretty obvious which is cheaper, even before we get into pilot training costs and the long length of the .mil pilot training pipeline, etc.

Plus, TLAM isn't expected to be very survivable in a contested environment, especially around S300/S400 sites. That's the impetus for developing the troubled JASSM.

http://www.onr.navy.mil/Media-Center/Fact-Sheets/Electromagn...

I'm just going to leave this here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBKvlLzGkvU

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/13/olsen_raptor_case_ge...

And the fact that the F-22's stealth coatings, even if they work, ablate in rain.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/11/f-35-gets-stealthier...

And of course the ludicrous idea that the F-35 can replace the A-10 Warthog in combat.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/01/a-10-f-35-air-force-...

The A-10 problem bugs me more than the others. The A-10 is a proven warplane that ground troops count on for cover. The F-35 doesn't have the capability to fulfill its role, which could place our troops in greater danger.

But that said, I think there's a decent argument that can be made for phasing it out given current operational needs:

The A-10 was originally designed in the Vietnam-era as a close air support(CAS) aircraft for conventional wars, armed with a payload of unguided bombs and shells to destroy tanks.

Helicopters at the time couldn't carry these types of anti-armor heavy weapons, and strike aircraft like the A-1, A-6, and F-4 couldn't survive anti-aircraft fire at low enough altitudes to put their bombs on target. In CAS roles, missing the target meant killing friendlies, obviously unacceptable.

Thus, the A-10 was built like a beast so that it could survive SAM/AAA fire at the low-altitudes needed to deploy these weapons accurately.

Over time, however, CAS munitions have evolved with guidance, from missiles like the AGM-65 and Hellfire, to laser-guided (GBU-27) and GPS-guided (JDAM) bombs. These have longer ranges and thus don't require the carrier aircraft to be nearly as survivable. The A-10s resistance to AAA and small arms fire seems less relevant.

This suggests that the A-10 may be less necessary for strike roles, even if it carries them out admirably.

It is hard to beat A-10 in its role, instead i think something new will be developed on the edge of its envelope, specifically on the low end - big RC planes (mid-size VTOL drones carry-able by one Hummer) with Hellfires/etc controlled by the troops who need the cover - that would provide more prompt (though less powerful) air support than calling in for big guys help and waiting for it to appear.

Compromised designs are compromised designs.

What's really sad is comparing the capabilities of today's carrier airwing with what was available in 1991. Then you had F-14D, F/A-18C, S3, A-6. A great array of aircraft that had the range to take the fight to the enemy.

Now you have the F/A-18E, F/A-18C, and that's it. No S3 for ASW, no long ranged tactical bomber, an "interceptor" that has short legs, and you've also given up your KA-6D for inflight refueling, relying on buddy tanks off the already shortlegged F-18.

sigh...

Also, the vertical takeoff capability will be mandatory for a hypothetical future war against a major power. Once the huge, lumbering aircraft carriers are sitting on the sea floor, they will be replaced by heavily armored battleships. In a major war, the only sea launched aircraft will be VTOLs.

Huh... there isn't a single battleship in service in any navy in the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship#Modern_times

We would do better to assume that future battleships won't get built, and that future surface combatants for the foreseeable future will be all carriers and destroyers.

US hasn't realized this yet because we are currently using our military might to pick on folks who are decades if not a century or more behind us technologically but would likely be a different story against a more up to date competitor.

One of the real lesson of the JSF is the amount of institutional inertia surrounding it. We were effectively pot committed before they had demo planes to play war games with. They spent 10+ years selling the idea. How do you kill a project like that? There is a certain irony to how the US picks weapons platforms too, everybody wants a new toy so who says "no" when the toy isn't quite up to snuff? So politically, we kill all the things the JSF is going to replace, we build love for the new platform, promise the world when nobody has even seen it.

The whole "jump jet" fascination is an interesting one, why do you need to land or take off a fighter/bomber from a place where you can't fuel it, can't reload it, and it doesn't carry cargo and people? Now the concept is cool, I get that, I just don't see where it fits in to the war fighting plan in a general way, not until planes have like nuclear reactors for fuel or something like that. It just doesn't seem generally useful.

I was told by a Marine that the Harrier obsession stems from Guadalcanal in WW2. The waters in the Solomons were heavily contested and the Navy basically took off and left the Marines stranded. That institutional memory is hard to shake.

There actually very much like medium-deck carriers, which are the biggest carriers anyone not the US Navy operates anywhere. The Marines seaborne aviation capacity carried on its various amphibious ships outclasses, IIRC, all the non-US naval aviation in the world combined.

> Ward said any future warplane should have clear and narrow requirements, as opposed to the F-35's broad, incompatible guidelines. Development timelines should be fast, budgets should be inexpensive, the overall concept should be simple and hardware should be as tiny as possible.

The one way we have today to accomplish all those goals together is unmanned aircraft. Simple because no life safety systems. Tiny because no human factors (displays, radios, windscreens). Cheap because no need to get every plane home safe (mission success largely determined by delivery of sufficient quantity of planes to the theatre).

The political process drives the insanity of trying to serve multiple purposes with thousands of design engineers strategically located in as many Congressional districts as possible.

I think drones should be used for every application that they are appropriate for -- why put people on the line when computers can do the work? But just like the JSF project attempted to serve many masters, assuming drones are the optimal decision for all military aircraft requirements is dumb.

The Chinese and Russians are building high performance aircraft for less than $1 Trillion. There's a reason for that. We can too.

Drones will probably get good enough to do most air to ground, at 1/10 or 1/100th the cost or whatever figure is being thrown around. Maybe even air-air, although I don't really think anyone has seriously tried this yet.

Manned aircraft in the meanwhile will pad a a large number of Pentagon manager's retirements and kid's college educations...

And if you think CVNs are expensive, you should research how much retrofitting an Iowa Class with a STOVL flight deck would cost. And then factor in manning costs for a ship that needs close to 5000 sailors.

Drone payloads are still relatively light compared to heavily-laden fighter-bombers (or indeed outright bombers). This will likely evolve over time (the future bomber program requires both manned and unmanned capabilities in some proposals).

I know people fear China but they are no cold-war Russia. Anything conventional and the US is in the lead by a lot. There's no reason to discuss anything nuclear because everyone loses in that case.

There have been reports that the Chinese have developed and brought to initial operational status the DF-21D, a medium-range, hypersonic, anti-ship ballistic missile specifically designed to be a carrier-killer [1]. The concern is that our carriers might be chased from the Western Pacific.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-21#DF-21D_.28CSS-5_Mod-4.29_... -- also http://thediplomat.com/flashpoints-blog/2013/06/12/why-china...

It's one of the reason that warships in general (including carriers) are designed to be compartmentalized, to have redundant backups (and backups to the backups), etc., is because it is expected they might have to survive battle damage.

Obviously an ASBM may change the calculus of whether you send carriers in early in the conflict (preferring instead to use submarines with cruise missiles to take out Dong Feng launch sites or whatever you'd have been trying to bomb in the first place). But I don't see how ASBM is a guaranteed single-shot carrier kill by any stretch either.

For a carrier, not-sinking != operational. The flight deck, catapults, and arresting gear are necessarily exposed to anything that explodes above them. Take them out and the carrier is basically useless.

A carrier can be severely damaged or even sunk by just a few comparatively-small bombs if they're well-placed, intentionally or fortuitously. This was vividly demonstrated at the Battle of Midway in June 1942 [1], where four Japanese carriers and one American carrier were sunk. (It only took one U.S. bomb to sink the unfortunate Akagi.)

In January 1969 my former ship, the USS Enterprise, was taken out of action for several weeks by an accidental fire on the flight deck that cooked off ordinance, spread, and killed 27 sailors [2]. (It was before my time there.)

I would imagine that a ground-launched ballistic missile could carry a much bigger payload than I've been talking about. But yes, it'd be no small navigational challenge to make sure an ASBM actually got to the (moving) target and past the last-ditch defenses.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Midway#Attacks_on_the...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Enterprise_(CVN-65)#Vietnam...

However USS Yorktown was "taken out of the action" a couple of times in WWII and still put back into the fight and playing very important roles in that fight, before eventually being sunk by a Japanese submarine. So it's definitely fair to say that simply damaging a carrier is not nearly as catastrophic as sinking one.

It is fair to say that the situations are not equal.

If the carrier can't fight, it's out of the battle until it's fixed. Fixable don't count if the war is over in weeks, or months.

Fixing a modern carrier might can take a while.

Yorktown was not a complex warship. She takes a hit on the deck. Patch up the holes in her deck (I'm simplifying) and she's back in business.

Hit Ford in the same location and you damage catapults, arresting gear. Ford is out of the war until she is fixed and this will not happen soon. How long to replace a catapult: I'd guess months at best. Where do they even keep the spares?

How is a carrier going to protect itself from coordinated submarine attacks?

A-10: holds 1350 rounds of 30mm ammo. F-35: holds 180 rounds of smaller 25mm ammo internally, plus 220 rounds externally

A-10: 1.8 hour loiter time. F-35: Not listed, but as a high subsonic (stall speed) fighter, it's going to be shorter

A-10: Has titanium armor protecting the pilot & critical systems. F-35: Already overweight, no chance of any armor.

A-10: Can be field repaired. F-35: Because of stealth requirements, only the simplest of damage can be repaired in the field.

And then there's the price...

[Edit: Added stall speed qualification]

Of note, I think it was Pierre Sprey's (quoted in this article) baby.

Speaking of which, watch "The Pentagon Wars" sometime. Has Cary Elwes and Kelsey Grammer in it. It's all about the M-2 Bradley. "What it needs is a turret on it!" Col. Burton sacrificed his career to make the Bradley less of a danger to the troops it was designed to protect.

If he'd been right, the F-16 wouldn't have all those hardpoints or a radar (he believed air combat would be managed by ground controllers). You can say the F-16 evolved, but it sure as hell didn't evolve as he thought it should.

The AF and Navy/USMC need a plane for dropping bombs. They keep hacking fighters to do that. But they're more right than Boyd was.

The F16 is around 27,000 lbs (air-to-air loaded)[1], the F15 (which was developed around the same time)is 48,000 pounds[2]

The F16 did develop a pretty decent ground attack capability but it does have a pretty good air-to-air record too: eg, the Israelis used it against the Syrians in the early 80s, the Turks and Greeks used them against each other in non-shooting dogfights[3])

The AF and Navy/USMC need a plane for dropping bombs. They keep hacking fighters to do that. But they're more right than Boyd was.

Meh.. I'm not sure this is a simple right/wrong thing. There have been very limited wars where airforces have been reasonably closely matched since the F16 entered service. In the mid 70s (after Vietnam & the Yom Kippur war in the Middle East) no one predicted that at all. It was only the Yom Kippur war that made planners see what a threat SAMs were on the battlefield (they had been fairly ineffective against fighters during Vietnam)

When one side has air supremacy, then yes - they will use that as much as possible. It's been that way since WW1

[1] http://www.f-16.net/f-16_versions_article9.html

[2] http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blF_15_Eagle.ht...

[3] http://www.f-16.net/news_article1809.html (there are other incidents too)

I hadn't heard he was opposed to a radar in the F-16 -- depending on ground control doesn't make sense for an offensive unit. He probably didn't anticipate how lightweight modern electronics have become.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyakI9GeYRs

The major difference is in posture. The US military wants to be able to project power globally. That means fighting from carriers or allied bases of varying quality half way around the world. The Chinese only care about their borders and regional power projection. VSTOL doesn't gain them anything since they'll never be that distant from their own bases.

This is the same reason why the Chinese haven't put much into carriers, but have a ton of ballistic missile ships.

Indeed, the same is true of the J-15 (an Su-33 clone), which is currently the only carrier-capable aircraft they've flown. Fewer than 16 of these aircraft have been built. Its use of the AL-31F makes the J-15 hard to produce, but also severely limits its payload/range.

For reference, over 500 of the mainstay F/A-18E/F Super Hornets have been built, and ~1500 of the previous models (A-D) were produced.

The Russians are none too pleased about Chinese repurposing and reverse engineering of their aircraft (particularly for engines), and have stopped selling Su-27s and many aircraft parts to the Chinese over IP disputes.

The lack of Chinese airpower and carrier operations isn't a product of posturing or strategic differences. They've invested a huge amount of money retrofitting the Admiral Kuznetsov (now Liaoning), are building a second one, and are training pilots for carrier ops with foreign trainers.

The Chinese air capabilities are instead hampered primarily by a lack of engine technology and production capability. Never mind the lift-fans.

The Liaoning is a bit of a weird duck. It provides air cover and anti-submarine capabilities to naval formations, but it's not capable of projecting power into a region via strike missions the way US carrier groups do. It fits within the posture I described. But also it seems like it may just be a boondogle to satisfy some admirals that want to be one of the nations that has a "carrier".

Also, keep in mind that the WS-10A is derived from the AL-31F, which was first flown on the Su-27, but has since been replaced in Russia by modernized AL-31FM1 and 2 or the new 117 family engines. The FM and 117 series engines have generally better performance than the older F/FN parts, and likely are more efficient. Thus, we can see that the Chinese are working off an old design.

Thank you!

That being said, there are still some significant problems with the F-35.

And many of those ships are carrying large numbers of SS-N-22 Sunburns, only one of which can sink a carrier, and which stand reasonable odds of penetrating even the latest generation point-defense platform. Fire ten at a carrier, maybe one or two get through, no more carrier, battle over.

Also, only the four Sovremeny-class destroyers carry that missile.

While all these missiles are very fast, they also very visible in IR because of their speed, so it makes shooting them down easier, so they expected to be fired like "wolf pack":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-700_Granit :

"The missile, when fired in a swarm (group of 4-8) has a unique guidance mode. One of the weapons climbs to a higher altitude and designates targets while the others attack. The missile responsible for target designation climbs in short pop-ups, so as to be harder to intercept. The missiles are linked by data connections, forming a network. If the designating missile is destroyed the next missile will rise to assume its purpose. Missiles are able to differentiate targets, detect groups and prioritize targets automatically using information gathered during flight and types of ships and battle formations pre-programmed in an onboard computer. They will attack targets in order of priority, highest to lowest: after destroying the first target, any remaining missiles will attack the next prioritized target"

http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=6779

Possibly they are only doing this to fake us out, and I don't disagree with the war nerd's argument that carriers make worryingly good targets...but I wouldn't write off the whole concept just yet.

No, they are doing it to maintain their regional position with regard to potential conflict areas with regional rivals in the Indian Ocean/South China Sea area, particularly, India.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/12/world/asia/india-aircraft-carr...

http://exiledonline.com/war-nerd-china-joins-the-yacht-club/

The DF 21 is basically unstoppable, best long term solution inho is putting drone carriers underwater

Your only other options are to fly your planes straight from the USA to your target, or to build bases with airstrips all over the world, which are easily bombed.

This is changing...

vs.

"The F-35, by contrast, is being designed by some 6,000 engineers led by a rotating contingent of short-tenure managers, with no fewer than 2,000 government workers providing oversight."

Although the 30 months quote is really misleading: the surface analysis prefiguring the Have Blue concept were started in 1974, XST phase one was started in 1975, the Have Blue demonstrator first flew in 1977.

31 months (not 30) is the time between the full-scale development decision and the first test model, decision to operational capability took 5 years (minus a month, November 1978 to October 1983) and almost 8 if you add the Have Blue studies.

> Doesn't Kelly Johnson give Ben Rich the advice to never work with the navy?

It's more than that, it's Kelly's unwritten 15th rule of management:

> Starve before doing business with the damned Navy. They don't know what the hell they want and will drive you up a wall before they break either your heart or a more exposed part of your anatomy.

It's in the early page (#2) of the chapter on Sea Shadow.

The bureaucratic morass was from the Air Force and mentioned in the penultimate chapter about the B2:

> When we began testing out stealth fighter, the combined Lockheed and Air Force personnel involved totaled 240 persons. There are more than two thousand Air Force auditors, engineers, and official kibitzers crawling all over that trouble B-2 assembly building in Palmdale. What are they doing? Compiling one million sheets of paper every day — reports and data that no one in the bureaucracy has either the time or the interest to read.

> The Air Force now has too many commissioned officers with no real mission to perform, so they stand around production lines with clipboards in hand, second-guessing and interfering every step of the way. The Drug Enforcement Agency has 1,200 enforcement agents out in the field [nb: the book was published in 1994, the DEA has learned since…] fighting the drug trafficking problem. The DOD employs 27,000 auditors. That kind of discrepancy shows how skewed the impulse for oversight has become both at the Pentagon and in the halls of Congress.

He also presciently notes that the way the B2 was done (involving multiple manufacturers in a huge project) would spread and infect all future projects as the number of projects would diminish and the DOD would spread projects around to avoid any contractor dying.

These are all good things, though. It's a focused airframe absolutely excellent at what it does. Much like the A10 really.

> and was relatively quickly retired

Beg pardon? The F-117 reached operational capability in 1983 and was retired in 2008 (the original plan was 2011, it was retired earlier to free money to buy F22s). And they've flown as recently as 2010 around Nellis.

Further, having a variety of specialized aircraft that do not share an airframe is a maintenance nightmare on the ground, as training and parts are necessary for each different kind of aircraft flown. Operating out of a major air base this is less of an issue, but with FOBs and aircraft carriers this is nigh impossible. Indeed, this was one of the motivating factors that drove the Navy to replace the A-6, F-14, EA-6B, and S-3B with aircraft derived from the F/A-18E/F line.

Yes, the F/A-18E will never have the unique capability of the F-14D, but apparently those planes were a massive pain to maintain. Similarly with the F-117 -> F-35. Beautiful beasts.

As of late, and not for a first-of-its-kind craft.

A surprising thing is that countries taking part in development are not permitted complete access to program data. The U.S., despite making use of other nations expertise in the development and manufacturing of the F-35,is trying to keep some aspects classified from the nations who are supposed to buy the plane!

Some Canadian pundits have (not seriously) called for the F-35 to be ditched and the Avro Arrow resurrected. The Arrow was developed in the 50's as an interceptor and, other than being significantly faster than the F-35 is probably inferior for Canada's requirements. It was designed in the freakin' 50's! It really is amazing that Canada went from manufacturing other country's WWII propeller plane designs to building prototype's faster than today's state-of-the-art F-35 in just a little over a decade. The fact that the F-35 is significantly slower than a 55 year old jet really shines light on how compromised its design is.

There are many rumors surrounding the cancellation of the Avro Arrow since it was probably superior to any other interceptor of its time, and one that refuses to die is that the U.S. was pressuring Canada to drop the program since Boeing, Lockheed, etc. felt threatened by Avro. Avro was basically destroyed by the cancellation of the Arrow, and guess where Avro engineers wound up!

I mention all this because Canada, despite being a perpetually self-doubting nation, has significant aerospace and weapon expertise. Canada also has some pretty unique design requirements not met by any existing fighters. The budget to build fighters locally may not ultimately exist, but if the Canadian government decides to compromise to cut costs, the F-35 is a horrendous option. It doesn't meet Canadian requirements, isn't on time, is getting more expensive every day, and the U.S. is trying to treat them like turn-key installations rather than selling planes.

Why should the U.S. care? Every nation that bails on the JSF program will raise costs for those that remain. Once one nation leaves, a domino effect will likely ensue. Based on this article, I can't say that's necessarily bad!

There are two types of F-35 test aircraft: flight sciences jets, which don't have the full avionics suite, but are instrumented for testing things like flutter, flight qualities, weapons testing, etc. -- and mission systems aircraft, which have the full suite of avionics and are thus more encumbered with restrictions. Foreign persons aren't allowed around the mission systems aircraft without an escort, and aren't supposed to even see the panoramic display in the cockpit. But what do you do when it's a night shift and the only flight systems engineer on duty who is officially qualified to perform certain operations is from the UK? You get a piece of foam, cut it to the size and shape of the display, and write "BRIT BLOCKER" on it in sharpie, and use it whenever the Brits are around.

Further absurdity kicked in when some of the first jets built specifically for the UK were tested. Those jets had the full avionics systems, of course, which meant that foreigners couldn't work on them. So the UK engineers weren't even allowed to be around the jets that were to ultimately be owned and operated by the UK.

This is nonsense. The tradeoffs for speed are fantastically expensive and haven't made sense since the 1950's. You reach Mach 3 only with an extremely high fuel expense, with afterburners, so expensive it limits your combat time to minutes. This made sense in the obsolete 1950's role of interceptors (like Avro Arrow), which chased obsolete 1950's strategic bombers. The adversary is obsolete, the role is obsolete, and the tradeoff is also obsolete.

While we're doing nonsensical comparisons with cold war interceptors -- they also carried air-to-air nuclear missiles [1][2]. The F-35 is not only slower and heavier, it also carries smaller weapons!

(edit: I should clarify I'm not defending the F-35 (I'm ignorant about it), only criticizing the interceptor comparison, which is invalid).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIR-2_Genie

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-26_Falcon

Here is actually a link to a video of the plane http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8lTGTPQlDE, note the old Canadian flag at the beginning, the Canadian flag we all know was created in '65.

It is a very interesting look at this bit of Canadian and aviation history, and the conspiracy theory that the program was cancelled due to political pressure from the US.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-official...

However, I'm not certain the Gripen have enough range - at least not until Gripen NG comes around. That may change that equation.

They could probably just build four times as many for less cost. I don't know what it would look like once you factored in readiness, basing, pilots, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_CF-105_Arrow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-35

"In the scenario, 72 Chinese jets patrolled the Taiwan Strait. Just 26 American warplanes — the survivors of a second missile barrage targeting their airfields — were able to intercept them, including 10 twin-engine F-22 stealth fighters that quickly fired off all their missiles"

To summarize this scenario:

  () Successful Chinese first strike.

  () 72 Chinese aircraft.

  () Operating at short range

  () With initiative

  () 10 F22

  () 16 F35

  () Operating at long range

  () Without initiative

In assessing the probability of the scenario, my questions:

  () how many allied drones?

  () where is the Navy?

  () when did the straight of Taiwan stop being
     a nuclear tipping point?

This is always what bothers me about any discussion of the modern US military. It seems like every "war game" or scenario is half baked, where US forces go head to head against a similarly artificial Chinese or Iranian or PRNK force. The winner of the scenario wins the war, and peace is restored to the universe.

So 1: What is the scenario where two nuclear powers engage each other directly that does not end in nuclear war?

2: What non-nuclear nation has the capability to engage the US in conventional warfare after a flurry of cruise missiles and drone strikes? A lot of good an air force will do Iran if it's destroyed on the tarmac.

Ah, good old theory, it's always more reliable than practise!

It's telling that a lot of the quotes from this article comes from former members of the "fighter mafia" that pushed for focused designs from small groups done in "stealth" before the committees with their "mission creep" hit the design process. The F-16 and A-10, as a result, were widely hailed as revolutionary designs for the roles they were meant for (although in hindsight they followed the obvious path for air superiority and close air support aircraft). The F/A-18 was not quite as capable, but was nevertheless able to benefit from the design knowledge gained by these programs.

The managers/designers of the F-16 and A-10 programs include Chuck Spinney and Pierre Sprey, both heavily quoted here. John Boyd was one of the major figures, and is probably one of the most hated men in the Pentagon, but has since passed away.

The F-35 is succeeding brilliantly in its mission, though, which is to funnel taxpayer money to a nice fat cross section of the military-industrial complex.

You can draw numerous analogies between the development and "success" of the space shuttle, and the F-35 program.

Identical management style means identical results, more or less. Its going to cost a lot more than planned, satisfy no one, kill a bunch of the good guys, take a lot longer to develop, cost more to operate. This is the "startup lesson" of this story and why its on "Hacker News". You wanna screw up your startup, go ahead, do it just like the STS or the F-35 did and have a committee promise everything to everyone.

And in one of its secondary missions, which is to generate hundreds of thousands of votes for many Reps. and Senators, spread across many Congressional districts and states - and both parties.

  |------------------------|-----------|----------|
  |                        | F-16      | F-35     |
  |------------------------|-----------|----------|
  | Maximum speed          | Mach 1.2  | Mach 1.6 |
  | Combat radius          | 550 km    | 1 080 km |
  | Dry thrust             | 76.3 kN   | 125 kN   |
  | Thrust w. afterburner  | 127 kN    | 191 kN   |
  | First flight           | 1974      | 2006     |
  |------------------------|-----------|----------|

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_...

One advantage that the F-35 does have is "super cruise", the ability to go supersonic without afterburners (F-22 and Eurofighter Typhoon have the same ability). Other fighters are restricted to subsonic speeds except for short supersonic dashes.

Total thrust is not particularly interesting for a fighter's performance, thrust-to-weight ratio is, and the F-35 is quite a bit heavier. The F-16 has slightly better than 1:1 "loaded", with the F-35 only getting there by restricting it to 50% fuel.

I am not sure how exactly combat radius is calculated, but the combat radius of the F-16 is listed as half of that of the F-35 and to get decent thrust-to-weight you have to halve to F-35's fuel. Go figure.

One more thing to consider is that the combat radius appears to be with internal fuel only. The F-35 being a stealth design, it has been "optimized" for internal carriage of weapons and fuel, whereas with the F-16 you probably just add a drop-tank if you need more range.

The F-16's max speed is far greater than Mach 1.2, I thought, or at least it used to be before they added on weight to the thing.

It's also well known that the designers optimized the F-16's ability to quickly lose/gain kinetic energy, what they call "dump and pump". This is hard to quantify.

Some of the "nextgen" fighter capabilities widely touted are "supercruising" (i.e. supersonic flight without afterburner) and thrust vectoring, i.e. changing directions quickly by nozzling engine thrust off center. Amusing, the original YF-16A prototype could supercruise, and execute a "buttonhook turn" maneuver, without the fancy 21st century engines.

Imagine what the F-22's P&W F119 engine could do in a modernized F-16 airframe....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy-Maneuverability_theory

Assuming the Falcon figure is for a fully-loaded plane, it wins on thrust-to-weight ratio.

Rate of climb on the F35 is classified, so can't be compared.

It's somewhat more difficult to get accurate turn performance and acceleration information about the F-35. If I understand correctly (again, can't really find anything but conjecture for performance charts) while the F-35 has more sophisticated aerodynamic designs, the large cross-section looks to be a disadvantage in turn rates and acceleration (especially trans sonic).

Also, the F-35 is more maneuverable than the current F-16s which have to hang a ton of armament on pylons, as well as drop tanks to get range equivalent to the F-35. And try flying any F-16 into S300 range.

Now the criticisms of the F-35B (Marine STOVL variant) are semi-valid, and have affected some facets of the F-35A and F-35C. But other than cost overruns, the performance of the aircraft will be fine.

Any sources for this claim? The details on sales deals are scarce, but from what I gather Block50/52 models should be in the $40M range, or maybe even as low as $15M. The major exception being UAEs heavily modified Block60 which seem to go for significantly higher (in the $100M range).